Macron beats Le Pen
British Poet Oliver Goldsmith Cheers
To kinder skies, where gentler manners reign,
I turn; and France displays her bright domain:
Gay, sprightly land of mirth and social ease,
Pleased with thyself, whom all the world can please,
How often have I led thy sportive choir,
With tuneless pipe, beside the murmuring Loire!
….Lines 1–6 from France by Oliver Goldsmith
Emmanuel Macron beat Marine Le Pen in France today to win another 5-year term as president.
It is hard to imagine how Oliver Goldsmith (1730–1774) would have felt about that. Presidents? Elections? He died the same year King Louis XV died. Neither France nor the United Kingdom existed in their present form in those days…
Had he had lived a few years more, Goldsmith might have rued his words about French pastoral splendor, though they’d have been no less true or beautiful.
Some of my American friends think of Marine Le Pen as a “Nazi.” Odd.
The “French radical right” would be regarded as “radical leftist socialists” in America.
In America, undocumented persons are not eligible for Medicare, Medicaid, or any other form of public health care (except pre-natal care).
Undocumented persons (more than 10 million of them) are on the hook for nearly all medical expenses in America — primary, urgent, and emergency care. Attempts to expand health and medical coverage to undocumented persons are thwarted in Congress.
My understanding of Le Pen’s 2022 ‘health plan’ was that she intended to cancel reimbursement of benefits for ‘irregular’ residents (undocumented persons?) for primary care (which the media represented as ‘softening her views’ from her 2017 pledge to make foreigners pay for their own medicine in France). Wouldn’t that leave intact universal coverage in France for urgent and emergency care?
In America, dropping off an undocumented person at an emergency room might tip off ICE to that individual, or to that individual’s family’s location, triggering deportation (even if a hospital took steps to ensure that never happened). Would undocumented people be reluctant to go to hospitals under such conditions?
America had about 81 million Covid-19 cases and almost 1 million deaths. France had 27 million cases and about 144,000 deaths. So if one contracted Covid-19 in America, one had more than twice the chance of dying from it than in France.
French doctors are no better than American doctors. People who get sick might be far more reluctant to go to a hospital in America than in France though…until it’s too late.
Nobody knows exactly how many thousands of people died as a result of structural unfairness in the American health system. Medical records are not going to parse legal proceedings, and most undocumented people do their best to avoid close scrutiny, even if they are not facing deportation risks.
None of that is to say that I respect of admire Le Pen. I respect and admire France. May their president serve them well. Or to turn back to Goldsmith:
Here passes current; paid from hand to hand,
It shifts, in splendid traffic, round the land;
From courts to camps, to cottages it strays,
And all are taught an avarice of praise;
They please, are pleased, they give to get esteem,
Till, seeming blest, they grow to what they seem.Lines 23–28 from France by Oliver Goldsmith
Goldsmith’s style is a bit awkward for me to try to emulate. His witty wordplay, internal rhyme, and multi-sense verb usages within the same lines make a simple seeming poem trickier than most to imitate. Here’s my riff, filtered through current events:
Here passed a storm; Le Pen’s squalid Spring squall
And liberty, egality, fraternity persisted after all;
From Parisian cafes, through to Brittany
Pockets of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, pockets by the sea:
They strive, are striving, they give to get la vie
Till growing grace astounds, they vote for hope’s esprit.
